Chapter 24
twenty-four
It was a joy to kill.
Carcajou, among all the many Tribes, did not know what it was to retreat or surrender. Their battle rage—when it truly took hold—did not stop until muscle was shredded from bone, blood vessels popped, and the brain was shattered.
Even facing a good twenty upir, the idea of disengaging from battle didn’t even cross the sea of bloodlust now serving him for a mind.
The beast in him was fully loosed, and the mate that belonged to them both lay behind him, wounded.
Her bloodmusk terror filled this small space, maddening him even further.
He slunk back a few paces, the blood-trill filling his throat. The movement was only to make certain of his footing. The enemies were near, things of foulness and rancid death, more and more of them pressing through the small door.
He could hold for a long time here, since only a few at a time could fit down the stairs. If they wanted to advance into this room, it would cost them dearly. He had already thinned their numbers above, following the fading, flaring drift of light musk and silver distress.
Of her. She was here, and behind him. His mate was bleeding, and they had made her bleed. Had hurt her.
One of the upir—a female—appeared in the door. “Another one of these things? You’d think they would learn.”
His lip lifted. It was all meaningless noise. His growl, however, was a warning, resounding resounded from the sides of this filthy cave.
One of the upir darted in—a youngling, and stupid. It was a moment’s work to tear through the sweet-sick rotten skin, to spill the rancidness inside. He growled again.
“Kill it, you imbeciles!” the female shrieked. She smelled old, and rotting. Not the sickness of a bad batch of blood burning up an upir from the inside, but a clotted reek of pale wriggling things bursting when sunlight hit them, leaving thin pale scum on every surface.
The upir surged in, and he showed his teeth.
Behind him, his mate had gone silent, even her thin shallow gasps missing.
The tortured air was hot and close, his nose stinging, blood slicking his fur and a sharp, sweet pain spurring him on.
It was like wine in his blood, that agony. Strength and invincibility.
He smelled the fear on them. It teased at his nose, smarting and stinging from the thick miasma of death held close and hot in this bolthole.
He waited for them to come and die.
A sound like a drum being struck resounded through the structure above, a monstrous reeking burrow. The animal knew what it was the moment it reached his ears.
Tribe. Others of his kind, coming here. Perhaps they came to kill the prey as well. He heard their footsteps, their cries, a clash of bodies. There were so many upir; the sickness had been allowed to spread here, without the Tribes cleansing it.
He could not, now, remember why they had not harrowed this place. It didn’t matter.
The upir milled about in confusion, and he waited. He cared very little what they did now, as long as they left his mate alone.
She was so still, so quiet. He couldn’t hear her pulse. The crystalline call, the thread of musk that had led him through the cold slanting rain and successive waves of upir, was fading, as if she had somehow escaped him.
He didn’t dare glance over his shoulder. Not with the enemies drawing so near. He growled again.
A mass of them surged toward him, the female who seemed to be their alpha screaming in a high piping voice, white head-fur rising and falling in thick tendrils, hellfire dripping from her eyes.
He killed two with a single sweep, and the red rage took him. The enemy surged, champing and slavering, and he knew he was going to die. It didn’t matter. What mattered was standing fast, keeping them away from his mate as long as possible.
There were too many; he went down under the weight, clawing desperately, a last roar of pure defiance shattering what remained of the human in him. The useless weakness. It vanished, and nothing was left but the pain as their claws tore at him—
—and the world stopped.
The enemy scattered like quicksilver as Tribe poured into the cave, Changing and leaping, their howls and cries sweet and ringing over the twisting groans of the bloodsuckers. Confusion reigned. He lay on the floor, his skin running with crimson pain that spurred him even as it drained his will.
The upir died. Shrieking, cursing, howling, running or standing to fight, they died. One of the Tribe—a Bear, his hulking shoulders hunched—halted behind him.
He lay on the floor, knowing the Bear was near his mate.
She belonged to him. He must keep everything and everyone away. It was what he had set himself to do, and he was Carcajou.
But his body would not respond. The rage intensified, beating inside his bones. The rage would keep going until his heart gave out or his brain burst. He knew it—and struggled harder.
Ice and moonlight filled his nose, a soothing smell. “He’s far gone.” The words meant nothing, though the female who said them was Tribe. “Ilona! Help me!”
The smell reached back into memory, tinged with smoke and terrible grief. He had stopped someone else from plunging into the flames to save that smell, because the cold determination of animal survival told him to.
The human in him, all but buried under a landslide of rage, gave one powerful, agonized scream—and vanished again.
He struggled, but they were too strong. Fingers like vises, the cold drugging smell like chloroform, and he was dragged under a breaker of spangled darkness.
Still struggling. Still trying to scream a name that had lost all meaning yet still had to be repeated, over and over again, the name beating under his heart ever since he had slipped the chain and gone running into the cold night.
Even as his muzzle was clamped shut and hands smoothed along his flayed sides, the name gonged in his head, over and over again.
Sophie!